Very slow image presentations - case 2422

I'm using directRT (w/ medialab) to present participants various stimuli (image files) within a conditioning procedure. I'm finding the presentation of the stimuli to be very sluggish...there are relatively long pauses in between presentations and sometimes certain images are flashed on the screen much too quickly.

I should mention that this same procedure (with same .csv files, etc.) worked fine in previous experiments a couple years ago using different computers (with an older Windows OS and I believe previous versions of directRT/medialab). I'm now using brand new machines with, presumably, the newest version of Windows and empirisoft software installed on them.

Incidentally, a colleague of mine recently tried to run an IAT that I created (and used with other computers with older OS and previous versions of directRT/medialab) in the past and she reported that the presentation of the stimuli was also VERY slow.

I hope you can assist me with this...

thanks for your time

Dear Redker, I noticed from your dxdiag.txt file that you have a system configuration that coincidetally happens to be one that get many reports about. Basically, the red flag seems to be "Dell Optiplex running Windows 7 with an ATI Radeon Graphics card". A quick fix usually is to replace the ATI Radeon card with ANYTHING else (e.g., nVidia). It's just some kind of hardware/software interaction. However, there have been cases where other solutions have been found. Or other causes I should say. Do the sample run slowly on this same system? e.g., especially the "image priming" sample and the "IAT" sample? The image priming sample in particular is a good one to start with as a test. If it runs fine, then we can look at the differences between it and your study. But if it also runs slowly, then it may simply be an issue of display hardware, or associated drivers (which can also be the cause--e.g., too old, or too new/untested).

Or it could be a matter of the version of DirectRT. We spent a lot of time working on Windows 7 compatibility! In fact the Radeon cards work ok on MOST machines now with v2012 (just in case you are running v2010 or earlier).